Little Shilpa is the brand label and nickname of Shilpa Chavan, a hat designer who has rocketed to international attention since Lady Gaga was photographed wearing one of her head-pieces. She has also caused a stir at Mumbai’s Lakme fashion week with her theatrical designs, which defy the boundaries betw­een fashion and art.

Many of the collections of this Mumbai-based designer are made from found objects, and recycling is a passion which she pursues with a dedicated attention to the sculptural possibilities of materials as unexpected as rubber flip- flops or pieces of old saris.

There is poetry in the way she uses these scraps of history, grounded in her intense nostalgia for the passing of so much that was familiar in what she tells me was her middle-class Mahar­ashtrian childhood, as India continues with its rapid process of globalisation.

One of her recent collections, Fleurs du Mal, drew inspiration from the French 19th century poet Baudelaire, and his volume of poems, which centre on themes of physical and moral decadence, decay and the thwarted desire for spiritual redemption.

There can perhaps be no more timely metaphor for our current state of climate change than in the small details contained within the arresting theatre of Little Shilpa’s creations. The detritus of urban lives and mass consumerism is transformed into beauty, but beauty with a dark foreboding mood.

Sense, for example, the metaphorical poetry of how she encased small pieces of brocade from her mother’s vintage saris between slivers of Perspex, and formed these into necklaces to be worn like amulets around the neck.

Or consider how the Fleurs du Mal collection used flowers and the opposing symbolisms contained therein, of softness, purity or death and evil. These oppositions were channelled through the styling where models for the show were given an almost ghostly beauty. They were draped in white, a colour, which Shilpa says, is associated with mourning in India. Flowers printed on Perspex formed wreaths around the models heads; creation and destruction was the subtext of this ethereal beauty.

Shilpa’s approach is one of craft production, with each piece produced with her own hands. This limits the extent to which she can supply stores, but she prefers the simple and uniquely personal proc­ess of making each piece by hand. Even where she produces collections, no one piece will ever be quite the same as another.

She trained at Central Saint Martins and then with London-based high-society milliner Phillip Treacy. With Treacy, Shilpa says, she really learnt the technical skills of hat making, as well as the business side of running a fashion label.

She then worked as a stylist, often using her hats as part of photo shoots, but only slowly did she begin to envision creating hats as a venture in its own right, as people who saw her hats urged her to make more of them.

Although Lakme had never had catwalk collections dedicated to accessories, they agreed to after Shilpa presented them with a proposal for a runway show. This propelled Shilpa into circuits of media attention and PR representation by London-based agency Blow. But media attention is one thing, continued commercial success another, and there is currently only a small market for her pieces in India. It’s not easy to do this she says, but emphasises that its not that the Indian market isn’t ready for these kind of things, simply that platforms are limited. Yet her patient, craft-based approach to design is in tune with a turn towards the unique and hand made, a shift increasingly defining a key niche within luxury markets.

Shilpa is happy, for the time being, to bridge the worlds between art, design, fashion styling and millinery, and is not especially concerned with commerce; happier to inhabit a space which bridges the sale of one- off pieces in international galleries as well as her home ground of Mumbai.

Inquisitive, imaginative and true to her vision, Little Shilpa’s designs provoke new ways of seeing things, and now more than anything, we need such poets of design to chart the way forward. Her designs rethink the ordinary as the extraordinary in a mass-produced world, which urgently needs different ways of seeing things.

(The writer is Luxury Editor at Financial Chronicle. She is an anthropologist with expertise on luxury and sustainability and is currently writing her doctoral thesis on Indian fashion)

phyllidajay@mydigitalfc.com